And Goody Berlingot hopped from one leg to the other at the risk of falling and breaking her long, hooked nose.
The Children clapped their hands and everybody laughed.
The little girl was there, in her long white nightdress, standing in the middle of the kitchen, a little surprised to find herself on her feet after so many months’ illness. She smiled and pressed Tyltyl’s dove to her heart.
Tyltyl looked first at the child and then at Mytyl:
“Don’t you think she’s very like Light?” he asked.
“She is much smaller,” said Mytyl.
“Yes, indeed!” said Tyltyl. “But she will grow! …”
And the three Children tried to put a little food down the Bird’s beak, while the parents began to feel easier in their minds and looked at them and smiled.
Tyltyl was radiant. I will not conceal from you, my dear little readers, that the Dove had hardly changed colour at all and that it was joy and happiness that decked him with a magnificent bright blue plumage in our hero’s eyes. No matter! Tyltyl, without knowing it, had discovered Light’s great secret, which is that we draw nearer to happiness by trying to give it to others.
But now something happened. Everybody became excited, the Children screamed, the parents threw up their arms and rushed to the open door: the Bird had suddenly escaped! He was flying away as fast as he could.
“My bird! My bird!” sobbed the little girl.
But Tyltyl was the first to run to the staircase and he returned in triumph:
“It’s all right!” he said. “Don’t cry! He is still in the house and we shall find him again.”
And he gave a kiss to the little girl, who was already smiling through her tears:
“You’ll be sure to catch him again, won’t you?” she asked.
“Trust me,” replied our friend, confidentially. “I now know where he is.”
You also, my dear little readers, now know where the Blue Bird is. Dear Light revealed nothing to the woodcutter’s Children, but she showed them the road to happiness by teaching them to be good and kind and generous.
Suppose that, at the beginning of this story, she had said to them:
“Go straight back home. The Blue Bird is there, in the humble cottage, in the wicker cage, with your dear father and mother who love you.”
The Children would never have believed her:
“What!” Tyltyl would have answered. “The Blue Bird, my dove? Nonsense: my dove is grey! … Happiness, in the cottage? With Daddy and Mummy? Oh, I say! There are no toys at home and it’s awfully boring there: we want to go ever so far and meet with tremendous adventures and have all sorts of fun. …”
That is what he would have said; and he and Mytyl would have set out in spite of everything, without listening to Light’s advice, for the most certain truths are good for nothing if we do not put them to the test ourselves. It only takes a moment to tell a child all the wisdom in the world, but our whole lives are not long enough to help us understand it, because our own experience is our only light.
Each of us must seek out happiness for himself; and he has to take endless pains and undergo many a cruel disappointment before he learns to become happy by appreciating the simple and perfect pleasures that are always within easy reach of his mind and heart.
Colophon
The Blue Bird
was published in 1913 by
Maurice Maeterlinck and Georgette Leblanc.
It was translated from French in 1913 by
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Aasa Whittleton and Robin Whittleton,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2009 by
Juliet Sutherland, Jen Haines, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Design for “The Magic Flute”: The Hall of Stars in the Palace of the Queen of the Night, Act 1, Scene 6,
a painting completed between 1847 and 1849 by
Karl Friedrich Schinkel.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
June 6, 2023, 10:00 p.m.
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